Strong Opinions, Weakly Held Explained

A S-tier concept that is widely misunderstood

Now that I’ve made my break from Twitter I suddenly have a desire to lean into writing here and to engage with some of the ideas I see floating around.

One of the defining concepts that guides my decision-making is the idea of “strong opinions, weakly held” (SOWH). I first heard the phrase from Frank DuPont (AKA Fantasy Douche) over at Rotoviz, but the concepts underpinning it have been a part of my thinking my entire career. From starting a winery, to building a tech company, to writing and analyzing football, SOWH has influenced my choices in each domain.

So when my former colleague at Rotoviz Ben Gretch wrote this yesterday I couldn’t not share my thoughts:

There’s this idea I’ve written about before of “strong opinions, loosely held.” There’s an inherent flaw in that. If I’m constantly shifting my opinion on players based on last week’s box scores, why should you care about what I’m writing this week?

I get what Ben is trying to say, but this is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the idea!

SOWH is not a license to dither. It’s the cure for dithering. It’s a way out of paralysis by analysis.

In football, for instance, the games must be played. You can't wait until you're completely prepared and have all the answers. In business, sometimes the decision must be made, right now, under great uncertainty.

The best way to handle these situations is to take the information you have, develop a working hypothesis and make a decision based on that. The trick is to be willing to completely abandon this initial idea despite just having bet your team's chance of victory, or your business on it — so long as strong new evidence presents itself.

SOWH overlaps with ideas about keeping an open mind, certainly. But it’s absolutely not a call to dither.

As an extreme example, entertaining conspiracy theories isn't crazy — sometimes the swivel-eyed loons have a point. But failing to abandon a conspiracy theory in the face of strong evidence — or seeing conspiracies everywhere you turn — is holding onto your opinions strongly, and should be avoided at all costs.

The value in SOWH is when you’re faced with a new frontier, or a set of decisions for which you have no prior experience or no data. Here is how the person who coined the term, Paul Saffo explained it:

The fastest way to an effective forecast is often through a sequence of lousy forecasts. Instead of withholding judgment until an exhaustive search for data is complete, I will force myself to make a tentative forecast based on the information available, and then systematically tear it apart, using the insights gained to guide my search for further indicators and information. Iterate the process a few times, and it is surprising how quickly one can get to a useful forecast.

Since the mid-1980s, my mantra for this process is “strong opinions, weakly held.” Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then – and this is the “weakly held” part– prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction. Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again. You will be surprised by how quickly the sequence of faulty forecasts will deliver you to a useful result.

- Paul Saffo, ~2008

Taking effective action under immense uncertainty is the goal. It’s about forcing yourself to form a tentative opinion, and act on it. Later you have to evaluate your process and try to prove your initial hypothesis wrong, sure. But you can’t prove yourself wrong until after you’ve put skin in the game, won or lost (hopefully in a non-zero sum way), and now have new evidence to weigh against your initial opinion.

For people like Ben, who are open and honest and extremely ready to question their own assumptions, it’s the nudge to act that is often the most valuable. I can fall into the trap of questioning everything as well. I like to think through all possible eventualities. I’ll visualize every forking path, imagine the very worst outcomes, and let them play out in my head. I’ll let that wash over me, and kind of inoculate myself emotionally for the stone WOAT outcome. Then I’ll work up towards better, more reasonable scenarios. But! This is a coping mechanism, not a decision-making strategy! It allows me to perform for an audience (investors, employees, bosses, parents, children), but it doesn’t help me make good decisions.

Conversely, for people who like to rush into decisions and then slash a path through the forest with a machete, the admonition to take time to iterate on your core assumptions is most valuable. These types will often hold onto their initial opinions tightly, especially if they have early success. They need to be reminded that this all started with a guess, and improvement is the goal and requires introspection and self-analysis. I can be this type of person at times as well.

It really all depends on your personality type at the moment. But we need to be clear: SOWH is about taking effective action, not self-flagellation or navel gazing. If you’re afflicted with such personality traits, SOWH is the cure, not the disease.

The disease is us. Always has been.